


We Two Alone

by borealgrove



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Space, H/D Career Fair 2017, HP: EWE, Humor, M/M, Magic and Science, Near Death Experiences, Original Character(s), Post-Hogwarts, Science Fiction, Space Explorer Draco Malfoy, Space Explorer Harry Potter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2018-12-31 13:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12133614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/borealgrove/pseuds/borealgrove
Summary: In space, Harry is Just-Harry. He is also an idiot, a handyman, and a glorified battery.





	We Two Alone

**Author's Note:**

> For Prompt #[217](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LiaSm8GWFLsDD8KUOZmlTSHmhIMyFZzdqYNfB-25Khk/edit).
> 
> I'd like to thank my beta, MMB, first and foremost, for her superb fact checking, and for gently breaking to me the fact that I had initially used far more hyphens than was necessary when making up new words. She saved my bacon.
> 
> I would also like to send a big thank you out to the mods (thank you!) who were so supportive throughout this entire experience.
> 
> Finally... I read this prompt, and knew it was The One; thank you for coming up with the idea of the boys being space explorers, nerakrose, and putting it up for grabs! I've had a fantastic time writing this story.

The proximity alarm.

The—

Harry woke, ripped away the covers, and launched himself off of his top bunk, taking a very large, very firm breath in when he landed. Then, forcing himself to stand in place, let a deliberate, slow breath out. It wasn't time to panic. He had to keep his wits about him and put on his uniform properly or he'd be no use to anyone. Giving in to fear always, always made a situation worse.

Besides, he had no idea what the current situation was. It could be harmless.

"Hell and damnation!" His bunkmate spat, and Harry could hear the soft _thwap_ of sheets being thrown angrily against the wall. "I _just_ —I barely closed my eyes—"

"Morning, sunshine."

"Oh, to _hell_ with you too."

Harry snorted dismissively and began to pull on his uniform, making quick work of the trousers, shirtsleeves, and secure catches. After ensuring that its collar was free of wrinkles or twists, he smoothed the front seam of his jacket down to regulation with three practiced swipes, hiding the zipper that held it closed. Next he fastened his radio to his ear, shoved his omni-slate and multi-tool into the velcro pockets of his trousers, and ensured that the nameplate fastened to his jacket was both untarnished and, well... there.

Despite all the complaining, by the time Harry turned around, his bunkmate was already tightening the straps of his boots, the rest of his uniform looking pristine—such was the lot of a man who normally sat at a desk all day, Harry supposed. He slipped an omni-slate into the perfectly-sized pocket at the front of his jacket, and then he nodded at Harry, ready to leave.

Outside in the corridor, they joined a number of other crew members each jogging in the direction of their given stations, warning lights on the floor blinking in time with the blare of the alarm. They fell into step behind another pair heading for the mess hall as they were, their rhythmic footfalls echoing off of the smooth walls between each repetition of the alarm. Along the right-hand wall, the vast blackness of space flashed past them through thick glass porthole windows, the bright light in the corridors obscuring that of the stars.

It was organized chaos in the mess hall, with everyone standing or sitting in neat rows, yet shouting to their neighbours to make themselves heard. Their section chief waited at the front of the room, his expression more determined than worried. Suddenly, he pressed one hand over his open ear, cupped the other around his mic and his mouth, then closed his eyes in concentration; Harry could see the muscles around his jaw working as he spoke with whoever was on the other end of the radio.

Mere moments after the section chief ended the communication and dropped his hands to stand at attention, the alarm cut off and the holoscreen behind him lit up.

Harry hadn’t realized how tense the shrill, continuous noise had made him until he felt his body relax in its sudden absence. Beside him, he heard Malfoy let out a huff of grudging relief.

“As you are all aware, the last transmission we were able to intercept from Earth occurred 163 hours ago.” Commander Pekkanen looked out at them from her seat on the bridge, all remaining chatter in the mess hall dying down. “While we did not initially feel this was cause for concern, we are now re-evaluating that stance. Our long-range sensors are picking up magnetic interference and we've noticed variations in the orbits of the outer planets in the Solar System." She paused, glancing at something or someone out of view for several seconds, and then returned her attention to the announcement. "In addition, we have lost track of Neptune entirely." The statement hung in the air. "The possibility of it being obscured by another planet due to a heavily altered orbit is negligible."

Harry stared at the holographic projection of the commander's face.

"At this distance, it is difficult to determine exactly what the cause of these anomalies are, but as most of you have likely just surmised... it isn't anything to smile about. Dr. Srivastava suspects it may be a black hole wandering the outer system." She drew herself up straighter. "While this is far from being a definite threat, a black hole is the current, prevailing explanation for the anomalous activity in the Solar System, and we will begin immediate, preventative preparations in light of it. Currently, the anomaly appears to be affecting only those planets on the outer orbits in the system and there is every possibility that it will eventually veer off and travel outwards, away from home. In the event that its exit lies in our path, we must be ready."

There was a small, hard-won smile.

"If we could navigate our way out of the Oort cloud unscathed, we can certainly navigate away from a black hole that we're aware of now and will see coming. Captain Konoe and I couldn't have asked for a more capable, resourceful crew, and we have every faith that you will perform your duties admirably, to the best of your abilities." Another tip of her lips. "You may return to your scheduled assignments while I convene with Captain Konoe and the rest of the bridge to determine our next course of action. Please keep an eye on your slates for possible adjustments to your schedules and assignments as more information becomes available. Dismissed."

There was little movement in the room even when the hologram dispersed in front of the projection screen. Harry glanced at Malfoy's slightly flared nostrils, his rigid posture, and then around at the rest of his crewmates sitting in various states of shock, unease, and deep thought. A few people appeared to have resumed whispering to one another, looking none the worse for wear. Others began to get up and leave, alone or in small groups.

"Don't suppose we'll be getting all that much sleep in the next few Earth-days."

"Oh, yes, because we were getting _loads_ to begin with," Malfoy muttered back sarcastically.

"I'm sure no one will mind if we go shut our eyes for a little longer—they'll comm us if they find something."

Malfoy let out a quiet, but exceedingly dramatic sigh (he wasn't about to broadcast the full extent of his displeasure in a room containing some of their superiors), and stood up. "Coming?"

Harry nodded, standing up as well, and they made their way back to their cramped bunk-room. If it had taken little time to get dressed during the alarm, it took even less now to divest themselves of their uniforms. Sleep was the most highly-valued commodity on the ship, and no one on the crew was apt to waste it when their turn came around. Chocolate came in at a very close second, being of finite quantity on board—they would not be able to produce more once it was gone. Alcohol sat comfortably in third place, being hard to get a hold of, but entirely renewable. No one had smuggled any spirits on board, but several crew members had come prepared to make moonshine with memorized brewing and fermentation methods—it was a popular pastime during breaks in the labs or the engine rooms. The alcohol they had access to wasn't a pretty sight or smell, but it definitely got the job done on rare slack-shifts.

Slack-shifts weren't a commodity, in and of themselves. For one thing, everyone was given the same amount. For another, slack-shifts were enforced—everyone on the ship excelled in their respective fields and in the tasks on board that were assigned to them, not least because they actually enjoyed the work, even on the dull days. Harry knew more than a few people (Malfoy included—despite his grumbling) that became so absorbed in their research or their tasks, that they had to be ordered, reminded to take breaks, even to sleep. 

Given the very limited space for crew members on the ship, everyone specialized in at least two areas, and in some cases, there were no other personnel who could perform their specific duties. Being woken during designated sleep-hours to answer questions or to confront a sudden issue was an unfortunate reality that many of them dealt with. Harry and Malfoy more than most.

Of the sixty five person crew, he and Malfoy were the only two capable of magic.

It hadn't been intentional. Applications to become astronauts had been open to all members of the Earth public—Muggle and wizarding alike. But after the last three discouraging (not to say disastrous) forays into space by witches and wizards, fewer and fewer had applied. For the first manned mission to Mars, only one witch (Isabel Almanza) had made it through the final screening process and subsequent tests to be accepted into the crew for the mission. She had started to develop a very resistant (but non-contagious) illness after they had passed the moon on their trajectory to the red planet, and though it had not proved life-threatening, it had severely interfered with her ability to carry out her duties on board. She had done her best to muddle through with the support of the rest of the crew, and they had all taken great pains to document the illness as best they could. When they had again come within reach of the moon's orbit on their return, they had all been at a loss to find Almanza's symptoms rapidly disappearing, leaving her in her previous state of good health as soon as they had made a safe splashdown just off the coast of Australia.

The next mission to Mars had admitted three magic-using astronauts into the crew, and though all three of them came down with the same unknown illness as Almanza had in the previous mission, their symptoms had been nowhere near as severe, and hadn't interfered much in their duties. The third mission, which left before the second had returned, had been headed into and then beyond the asteroid belt in order to obtain samples from both Ceres and Jupiter. Only one wizard, Merrit Hopkeep, had been admitted to that crew, and after a series of intermittent, severe headaches once they had passed Mars' orbit, he had sadly perished, the ship's doctor unable to revive him after his heart had simply stopped.

A magibiologist working on the ground had been the one to notice the hint of a pattern: magic-users that travelled alone became sicker. It wasn't clear why this might be the case, but no one was keen on endangering another magic-user unnecessarily while a team of experts worked to determine the specifics. A strict ban was placed on witches or wizards being admitted into a mission alone, and the number of applications to astronaut programs from those in wizarding communities had then thinned dramatically. 

Upon hearing the new tentative discovery that could explain why her first trip to space had been so unbearable, Almanza had immediately submitted an application to be considered for the next mission that the alliance of space organizations on Earth planned to undertake. Eager to have a second chance at experiencing space travel the way she had always dreamed, Almanza had personally met with every other magic-using applicant that she could get a hold of, and had offered her time and expertise in order to coach them on all of the tests they were likely to encounter during the screening process. Competition and individualism would get them nowhere. At least two of them had to get through—even if neither of them were her.

When the _Clairvoyant_ finally launched, Almanza was proud to have been afforded the privilege to reach for the stars a second time, flanked by a bright and good-humoured young man named Gregory Maeno. The world (wizarding communities, especially) had watched and waited with bated breath as their ship slowly made its way past the moon, and then past Mars without any major incidents. Almanza and Maeno had developed a strong friendship over their years spent in the ship as they journeyed all the way to the outer edges of the Solar System and back again, conducting hours upon hours of research into the link between magical ability and compromised space travel with the help of their Muggle crewmates and occasional long-range transmissions from researchers back home. The data that they had continually sent back to Earth had proven invaluable.

Witches and wizards couldn't live without magic.

For how simple a fact it was, it was astonishing that no one had ever come to the conclusion before. Magic was not universal, and like so many other things essential to human survival, it did not and could not exist in the vacuum of space. However, unlike chemical compounds such as water and oxygen, magic did not appear on other planets devoid of life, could not be synthesized in a laboratory. As far as they had been able to tell, it was unique to Earth, or at least to the life that had developed there.

Muggles might have been dependant on water and oxygen to survive, but witches and wizards were further dependant on magic to maintain function of their bodies—their biological systems were indivisible from their magical cores. Too little magic, and their bodies simply... stopped.

Earth, they came to realize, absolutely reeked of magic; it leaked out of the atmosphere and into the orbiting space stations, even managed to reach the moon, to a degree. It wasn't something that Muggle technology had been calibrated to measure from Earth, however. They had all, Muggle and wizarding researchers alike, been staring at an unpainted wall, searching for atomic specks of colour, instead of seeing the unassuming wall for what it was. It had been Almanza and Maeno who had made the discovery, somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, of the very strange particles that made up each of their magical signatures. As they (and a handful of magical plants) had been the only ones on the ship giving off any kind of magic, it had suddenly become obvious. White noise had dispersed into discrete sets of particles, quantifiable and observable. Although magic could manifest in all sorts of ways through spells, and magical auras were occasionally visible to the naked eye, no one had ever before managed to pinpoint what magic itself actually was. And what it was, was strange.

Magic behaved in a manner that was unlike anything else in the known universe, changing its shape and function as needed—it hadn't been noticed in the past because it blended in, and because it could keep the shape of whatever it needed to, for however long it needed to. Visible light, radio waves, a cluster of subatomic particles that would make up an element... magic was the generic template from which just about anything could be created. Almanza, in a famous, recorded experiment with Maeno, had muttered, _they're like... Earth's stem cells_.

Their discoveries had caused an explosion in the academic realm of physics, with some Earth-based researchers scrambling to study the new ideas, others refusing to believe that such a strange particle existed. How could it, the general feeling went, if they'd never managed a glimpse of it themselves, in all their years of research? It became apparent, very quickly, that magic particles did not like to be noticed. If they weren't being manipulated by or attracted to an organism with its own innate magic, they would simply mimic whatever they happened to be nearest to. Those in the air would convene to disguise themselves as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide—those near grass would integrate themselves into the organelles of the plants' cells, or appear as moisture in the form of dew drops. In a laboratory setting, under a powerful microscope, they would appear indistinguishable from whatever other cells, other elements, other particles were being studied.

They were Schrödinger's particle, both magic and not magic at the same time.

The only way to reveal their true nature was to have a witch or a wizard join the research team, to have them cast something—anything—if possible. The less cocksure, more open-minded physicists sought out research partners from wizarding institutions right away. Magic particles were attracted to and used by the cores of witches and wizards, those nebulous, unknown parts of their physiology that allowed them to interact with magic. Strange things always happened if someone with magic stood nearby—otherwise normal-seeming matter and particles would display quirks, behave in unexpected ways. If magic was cast, whatever was under the microscope would excite, change, multiply, or else disappear entirely. Some physicists swore they could see something new, completely unknown, for a split-second during spellcasting, but accounts varied wildly and were notoriously difficult to replicate. Impossible, even.

Almanza and Maeno had not possessed the equipment to continue their groundbreaking research into magic particles to the extent that they would have liked, but they had made other notable discoveries, one of which had been just as fundamental as their first. They took turns casting minor spells during their experiments, as the paucity of ambient magic made spellcasting exhausting, and on their eleventh trial, Maeno had chuckled and said, _why do you always have to keep everything for yourself_?

His attempt at humour, which Almanza had prompted him to explain, had made them both realize that they each saw the magic particles they were studying do very different, fairly consistent things. When Maeno was casting, the particles appeared to double in number, but when Almanza was casting, their number would remain unchanged, even decrease. Physicists and magiphysicists back on Earth had been only too eager to examine the conundrum, each team tearing through their notes for remarks about particle numbers they had previously considered background noise to the exciting prospect of glimpsing magic's 'true', indivisible form.

Though it took months, there was finally a breakthrough from a group of researchers in Turkey when they met up to exchange notes and made a fortuitous, yet completely unintentional discovery. They had planned to repeat earlier experiments through a different type of equipment that had been bolstered by permanent spells, which could capture a snapshot of the tracks and trails of particles that resulted from a spell being cast. With magically-enhanced microscopes capable of observing magic particles reliably, and in real time, no one had thought to retry the experiments to obtain static images. The researchers in Turkey had meant only to verify prior results, but had instead stumbled upon a new understanding of what everyone had been observing.

Magic wasn't multiplying, disappearing, or staying the same in reaction to spells—the spells were smoke and mirrors, completely beside the point. Just by being near one another, with or without spells being cast, witches and wizards produced and exchanged magic.

In the control experiment, a snapshot had been taken with the outdated equipment of the two subjects side by side to establish a baseline for how particle trails would look absent of magical influence. Everyone in the room had been astounded to see the impressions printed on a special film that had been fed into the machine.

The witches, Bulum and Aksular, had each manifested their magic in distinct ways while completely at rest. Bulum's had radiated outwards in all directions, while Aksular's had stayed close to her body, seeming to lure or trap some of the outpouring of magic that Bulum had given off. No matter how many times they repeated the experiment, no matter how many different subjects they brought in, no matter if they were alone or in a group, it was always the same pattern: a magic-user either gave off particles, or trapped them.

The nuance was less pronounced in spellcasting, but the snapshots displayed differences there as well. The spells produced by magic-users that gave off particles (eventually named B-casters) appeared to be connected to the magic-user by a sort of funnel shape. In contrast, those produced by magic-users who trapped particles (A-casters) were connected to the spellcaster by a thin sort of string, with a cloud of ambient particles appearing to be attracted to the spell, feeding it, even. Of further interest was the way that A and B casters performed over time. The intensity of B-caster's spells, which they appeared to power from within, weakened over the course of multiple casts if no breaks were taken. On the other hand, A-casters who seemed to draw power from outside themselves, could cast at lower, but more consistent levels no matter if breaks were taken or not. Every magical plant and animal that they took a snapshot of mimicked B-casters in the way that they radiated magic.

From those observations, a new theory of magic had emerged: all magic-users were either A or B casters, with A-casters somewhat rarer in the population, their difference in ability likely a recent mutation. A wealth of tests had many convinced that A-casters 'trapped' and redirected ambient magic precisely because they generated so little of their own. No one had figured out a reliable way to confirm that hypothesis, but it gained rapid traction and a tenuous acceptance within the academic world regardless.

While this affectation of A-casters meant little on Earth, due to the abundance of magic that enveloped and seeped out of the planet, it was of great significance in relation to space travel. 

Almanza was not surprised when she was classified as an A-caster. Suddenly, the severity of her illness during her first mission had made sense, as had her rapid recovery as soon as they'd neared Earth and she'd been able to subconsciously soak all that leaking magic up. Her relative good health in travelling with Maeno on her second mission had been thanks to his classification as a B-caster, constantly giving off excess magical energy for her to trap and make use of. It contributed to his good health as well, since the excess magic she trapped and attracted stayed nearby even when she wasn't using it, meaning that less of it left the ship. If Maeno was a compressed oxygen tank constantly leaking air, then Almanza was the CO2 scrubber, the artificial atmospheric pressure, that would capture it and render it reusable within the ship.

In light of the new theories, the simple ban on witches and wizards being admitted alone to missions headed to outer space was rescinded and replaced with a detailed set of regulations that better represented all the emerging theories on magic. Among these, the most important were:

►No restriction shall be placed on a magic-user applying for admittance to an Earth-satellite space station.  
►B-casters shall be permitted to travel alone on missions whose planned trajectories go no further than the orbit of the moon.  
►For all missions that have trajectories passing beyond the moon's orbit, no single magic-user may be permitted to join the crew. Two or more magic-users must always be admitted to a crew at the same time, without fail, in accordance with the following criteria:  
● B-casters shall be accompanied by one (1) A-caster or two (2) or more B-casters  
● A-casters shall be accompanied by (1) or more B-casters  
● A single ship may not have more than one (1) A-caster aboard at a time

In short: if it hadn't been for Harry's last-minute, only-half-serious application to NASA's astronaut program five years earlier, Malfoy's posh, A-caster arse never would have made it into deep space.

_You're welcome_ , Harry thought with wry amusement as he drifted off to sleep.

\--------

Harry woke to his quiet but insistent alarm going off, for the first time in a long time giving in to the temptation to press the snooze button. Well. Not the snooze button, exactly—there wasn't one. He simply ignored the beeping and kept his eyes closed for a truly luxurious extra minute or two before opening them with a sigh and turning the alarm off. Mercifully, Malfoy didn't wake.

He swung down off of the top bunk, landed lightly on his socked feet, and began to dress with none of the urgency that there had been hours earlier. On his omni-slate there were several messages waiting for him, but none contained a new assignment. He skimmed through each message quickly, but none appeared urgent (aside from one reminding him about the upcoming poker tournament that he intended to make bank in). He tucked his omni-slate away and took a moment to brush invisible dust from the dittany plant that sat on top of his tiny, narrow dresser. Its continued existence was thanks to the little growing lamp he had installed there for it, the water he gave it every three Earth-days, and to his daily handling of its leaves—even Malfoy gave the plant a brush now and then before collapsing in bed when he wasn't too off in his head about an experiment.

The dittany was like them both, in that it needed magic to survive. No matter how reliably it was watered, no matter how well it was lit, if one or both of them neglected to touch it or approach it for more than a day or two, it would simply wither. The other magical plants on board, housed with the rest of the greenery in the botany lab, didn't have that problem: as they all grew clustered together, it was easy for their magic to constantly cross-pollinate to maintain their health. It would have been easier to leave the cutting of dittany in the botany lab, of course, but Harry found comfort in taking responsibility for the life another organism.

Really, Harry had just missed having a pet to take care of.

Of course, his official, written request to keep a plant in his bunk-room had included phrases like _effects of natural growth fed only by human-based magic_ , and _possible benefits of human-plant magic symbiosis_ , with an emphasis on _long-term study_. The study bit hadn't been a lie, exactly (he was keeping meticulous notes and met up with either of the two botanists on a semi-regular schedule to go over things), but it certainly hadn't been the whole truth.

Harry gave a parting smile to his miniature dittany plant and quietly left the room.

In the seventy two hours that followed, he went about his usual duties with his usual good humour and work ethic, responding to requests all over the ship for magical repair, manual repair, and all the other odd jobs that he just sort of figured out as he went along. It was all vitally important to the functioning of the ship, so Harry wasn't in the habit of complaining, even when he was roped into a cleaning job (he was no longer fazed by mucking out toilets, he could say that much). After all, the lot of it was downright relaxing in comparison to his primary job aboard the ship.

Not that he was in the habit of complaining about that one, either.

"Thanks, Harry—can't believe I didn't spot that burnt-out resistor. Feel like a dingus now. But, ya know, I'm more of a planty-person than a circuity-person..."

"Well, we can't all be prats graced with vague job descriptions around here," Harry shrugged with a bit of a grin. "There can only be one."

"Yeah, no—I'm with you there," Rochelle chuckled, adjusting the heat lamp whose circuitry Harry had just fixed. "I'm pretty sure the Captain _and_ Commander would have conniptions if there were more than one Harry Potter on board. I mean, we think you're a pain in the butt now..."

"D'you think they'd space both of me?"

"We're not in a movie, Harry," the head botanist laughed, shaking her head.

"No?" Harry's face fell. "Shit. You mean to tell me we're _actually_ in space?"

"Get out of my damn lab, you crazy English dude."

Rochelle waved him away with mock-anger, slapping one of her hands on her workbench to try and suppress the mirth still written all over her face.

"You going to be in the mess for supper?"

"Oh my god," Rochelle laughed, waving impotently at him again, "yes— _go_!"

"See you," Harry grinned, slipping out the lab door and pressing the button that would shut it behind him.

Out in the hall, he took his omni-slate out and marked Rochelle's last message as read, then thumbed it into his 'resolved' folder. Two new messages had come in since he'd last checked, neither of them coded as urgent. One was just a note from Rajender down in the water reclamation room ribbing him over his spectacular, early failure during the last poker tournament, and gleefully asking if there would be a repeat this time. Harry quickly tapped out a reply, snorting with grudging amusement, and sent it off. The second message was from Dr. Zborovsky, wanting to confirm Harry's availability for his monthly physical, which was in three Earth-days. He sent off a quick (affirmative) reply to that as well. He filed both of those messages into his 'Mates' and 'Health' folders, respectively, and then scrolled to the oldest unresolved message sitting in his inbox, opening it.

> **21:38 SETC 05/01/2029  
>  From: Han Jiyeon**
> 
> Hi Harry,
> 
> When you have time, would you come look at the filtration hose in duct 2A? Pierre and I are swamped, completely swamped! So many carbon filter replacements to do this week... and Raj isn't pulling his weight at all (joking, joking). We all took a glance at the hose and the possible problem doesn't seem catastrophic, but we're getting lower output volume measurements than usual, so... probably just needs a routine clean. Sorry to pawn this off on you... there's really no rush, but then, if you _like_ drinking clean water...
> 
> (P.S. please don't let Raj beat you again, he's so annoying when he gloats... if you could defeat a dark lord, you can defeat a _dork_ lord... just saying... :p )
> 
> Jiyeon

Harry really, really regretted getting pissed off his arse during their celebration upon successfully navigating through the Oort cloud and mentioning (in _passing_ ) to his mates in reclamation that he had once been famous for surviving an unavoidable death-spell... twice. He may have mentioned this in a yell, but all the same, it had been in passing. Harry was fairly certain most of them had heard the old stories to some effect before he'd met them, but he was also fairly certain that said stories had been taken with not just a grain, but an entire, heaping handful of salt. Which had suited him just fine. Instead of staring at him in awe, they had drunkenly shouted _Abra Kadabra_ at him several times over the course of the night (with fingers outstretched or wiggling), trying to startle him. He didn't correct their pronunciation. Mainly because it seemed likely to make Malfoy's eyeballs fall out of their sockets, on account of him rolling them too hard, too often. The uppity wanker.

What was truly unfortunate was how devastating said wanker had looked, sitting at the back of the glorified space-broom closet they had all squeezed into, while taking delicate sips of the swill that passed for high-quality alcohol on the ship. It wasn't the only alcohol on the ship, after all, it just tasted slightly less like shit than the rest. Which, naturally, had defaulted it to _high-quality_ status.

Nothing but the best for Draco fucking Malfoy.

And... think of the devil.

"Potter?" A familiar voice crackled in his earpiece.

"What d'you want?" Harry's tone was amused, though some weariness slipped through.

"So classless," he heard Draco sigh pointedly.

There was a pause, and Harry almost let his impatience get the better of him before Malfoy continued.

"I'm getting a headache. Would you stop traipsing all over the bloody ship and come to the lab?"

"You really make a bloke feel wanted, Malfoy."

"I know," he drawled over the radio, sounding unfazed by the jab. "Now get over here."

"All right," Harry huffed, shaking his head with exasperation, "I'm headed down to check duct 2A, anyway, so I'll be in the vicinity within minutes, and I'll join you in the lab right after I'm done there." He spared a silent, but cheerful grin and a wave for De Bruijn from comms as he passed down the same hallway.

"You're going _where_?" Came Draco's dubious voice. "We don't all have time to memorize the entirety of the ship's layout, Potter."

Harry barked out a laugh, then lowered his voice so no one else would hear. "Piss off. I'll be there soon."

It had been a surprise to find out that Malfoy had made the final cut of prospective astronauts at the same time that Harry had, but even more of one to find out that Malfoy had already been to space not once, but twice. He had logged several hundred hours aboard the ISS and the GASO (Global Astronomers' Space Observatory) as a test subject and a researcher, respectively. Though his stints in space stations had centered around magibiological studies, his true specialty was in magichemical compounds.

He made fuel.

And it wasn't simply that Malfoy made fuel, it was that he could make it on the fly, with whatever spare material he could get his hands on. He had been a fair potions' student at Hogwarts, but where Malfoy had really hit his stride had been in a Muggle university several years later (part of an ongoing attempt at 'rehabilitation'—apparently not the Ministry's worst idea ever). He'd pushed to combine magic and chemistry in a way that hadn't ever really been done before outside of alchemy... and Malfoy would tell anyone who would listen how alchemy was outdated, imprecise, and 'basically the discipline of charlatans'.

Harry was pretty certain that Malfoy was just bitter he had never managed to make a philosopher's stone himself, as any remarks about Nicholas Flamel's achievements in the field were always pointedly ignored.

His strides to join and spark the burgeoning discipline of magichemistry had been admirable enough, but Malfoy had then upped the ante by using transfiguration principles in his reactions to create substances and materials faster, more efficiently, and fully formed, in some cases. That had earned him desperate offers from all sorts of prestigious institutions, and over the course of several years, he had further refined his methods to leave behind as little waste as possible—the magic helping to turn production into a closed loop of creation and recycling. Malfoy had been directly scouted for the astronaut program in anticipation of the mission that they currently found themselves on... which was more than Harry could say for himself.

The carbon filters that helped scrub the ship's air of excessive CO2 were courtesy of Malfoy's ingenuity, as were countless other things on board the ship that Harry could not even begin to think of or list. Malfoy created, destroyed, and re-formed as needed, constantly adapting to each situation as it arose. On Earth, all of it had been a cinch, but space was another beast entirely.

That was where Harry came in.

Malfoy may have been a genius (to an _extent_ —and Harry avoided admitting this out loud), who cast a long shadow, but Harry hadn't won his position in the ship's crew by riding the coattails of his boyhood fame. After he'd fully embraced the idea of travelling to space, he'd thrown all of his energy, his determination into besting all of the competition. He'd read voraciously, bothered Hermione constantly with questions, and made a nuisance of himself at all the nearby universities. Harry was nothing if not a stubborn pain in the arse when he had a cause—he hadn't stopped to breathe until he'd received The Call, that transcendent holo conversation during which he'd been informed that he'd made the crew, and even then, his celebrations had lasted all of an evening.

The next day (nursing a hangover), the real work had begun.

Harry had been a natural at handling all of the preliminary buoyancy trials underwater and in parabolic aircrafts, and the higher-than-average levels of magic he gave off during his initial snapshot test to determine his caster type had been nothing to scoff at. But where he had truly impressed the evaluators had been in his persistence (a polite way to remark upon his stubbornness). He treated simulations as though they were real, he poured every bit of his energy into solving whatever problem was placed in front of him, and if he—Merlin forbid—couldn't solve it, he fetched whoever it was that could, pride and competition be damned.

In short, Harry didn't know what the term 'give up' meant.

His training during the two years leading up to launch had covered a wide array of skills and topics. He'd learned how to perform basic medical procedures, how to operate most equipment and control panels that would be on the ship, how to repair a wide array of electronic devices, and dozens of other things that his mentors and the board had thought might come in handy during the mission. That wasn't to mention all the lectures he had sat through that detailed each system that would be on the ship, and how they all interacted. It was exhausting—fascinating.

His training may have inadvertently prepared him to become the ship's designated jack of all trades, but that was only because his main assignment tended to give him plenty of downtime. Harry was the head spacewalker, the first crew member called when repairs or calibrations needed to be performed on the outer hull of the ship. On a boring day, that was.

On an interesting day, he was a miner.

They captured asteroids and other space debris as they progressed steadily through the void, and whenever they did, it was Harry's job to secure and board the object, whatever it was, and collect useful material from it. On a ship filled with supremely intelligent, resourceful, and hard-working people, it was nice to occasionally feel just a bit remarkable in comparison when he ran circles around whichever poor sod drew the short stick and had to work with him outside. Harry had to admit that Malfoy wasn't terrible at spacewalking when it came down to it, but the Commander frequently found excuses to keep Malfoy in the relative safety of the ship.

It was a novel feeling to be considered expendable—more funny to Harry, than offensive.

Harry's mining gave Malfoy the raw materials he needed to do his vital work, and—for particularly difficult operations—Harry sat next to him in the lab to act as a magic font. Well. Malfoy let him help in other ways sometimes, passing him tools and materials, performing minor reactions and so on and so forth... but Harry really just was a glorified electrical socket that allowed Malfoy to perform magic at about the level he would have been able to back on Earth. Without Harry spilling magic all over the place, Malfoy tired quickly and even made himself ill when he tried to infuse the chemical reactions with spells. Harry might have begun to resent it if he weren't saddled with a similar problem: too long spent away from Malfoy, even without performing any magic at all, tended to make Harry feel unwell, like he was coming down with a head cold.

Malfoy produced too little magic of his own while Harry produced so much that his body couldn't contain it, vented it too quickly at times. As best they could figure, Harry's overproduction had to do with being in a magic void—his core would try to equalize the magic in his body with the atmosphere, unintentionally harming him in the process.

Apparently his core still hadn't caught on to the fact that he was in sodding outer space.

It was a problem that Almanza and Maeno had experienced as well, though to a lesser degree; their ship had been far smaller so they had had to perform deliberate experiments to feel the ill effects Harry and Malfoy suffered if they weren't careful. He and Malfoy had quickly bitten the bullet and agreed to share a bunk-room after things had become miserable once they had passed outside of the radius of Earth's leaking magic. With Malfoy subconsciously attracting all of Harry's magic while they slept, keeping it in place, and Harry giving off enough to keep both of their cores balanced, it was sometimes enough to prevent ill effects for the rest of their waking hours. When it wasn't, they would join one another for a meal to reattain balance.

Which was exactly what Harry was on his way to do now. No doubt Malfoy had been (stupidly) casting without having asked for help and now wanted to do damage control after neglecting to prevent it. Harry was aware that he was being a hypocrite, but he would never admit to it out loud.

He had swung by the cafeteria on his way to duct 2A to grab a lunch for the both of them, had taken nearly forty minutes to clean out the hose that Jiyeon had messaged him about (she and Pierre had sent him pleased, but guilty-looking grins when they'd spotted him hard at work), and then finally made his way to Malfoy's lab. 

Located on the laboratory level (just above duct 2A, as it happened), Malfoy's lab was middling in size, with space for only two or three people to work in without knocking elbows. Malfoy worked alone most of the time, however, which made the lab seem a lot larger than it was. Though there were projects laid out on just about every surface, the space was clean and orderly, brightly-lit, and on the odd day, inviting. Today was not an odd day.

"Unless you locate me a bloody—" His face was screwed up in exasperated anger, cut off by whoever he was talking to on the other end of the radio. "No. No, no, _no_ , I told you that I needed— _yes_ , I needed it a week ago. Magic doesn't— _how_ many times must we go over Gamp's—" He rolled his eyes and mouthed _Merlin's tits_ , not noticing Harry in the doorway. "De Bruijn, calibrate faster and tell your team to find me a damned rock, or we're going to have very few options if that black hole comes knocking."

"I'll talk to him about it later," Harry said once Malfoy had ended the communication with a noise of disgust, chuckling when Malfoy jumped in surprise, leftover scowl not budging from his face.

"It's fine, Potter."

"No, it's not," Harry continued to chuckle, coming over to the worktable and settling onto his usual stool, opposite Malfoy. "He's a bit stuck up—you have to flatter him before you ask him to do something or he'll refuse on principle. Come on Malfoy, you're supposed to be the Slytherin here—figure it out."

"I don't have time to faff about trying to appease his ego," Malfoy scoffed, and it was a measure of how routine their lunches had become that he sat down immediately and accepted the meal packet that Harry handed to him without complaint. 

"I wonder what that feels like."

"Oh no," Malfoy intoned flatly, "call Dr. Zborovsky. It's a miracle. Potter's finally made a humorous remark."

Harry decided to be the bigger man and ignore the jab, picking up his spork and opening the foil packet that contained his lunch instead. It smelled edible, at least—that wasn't always the case.

"Vile," Malfoy commented, tutting as he opened his own lunch packet.

Harry couldn't help the snort of exasperated amusement that escaped him, and tried to cover it up by taking a bite of his food, but due to an answering snort of amusement from Malfoy (which snowballed into shared chuckling), the spork never made it to his mouth.

They hadn't seen much of one another after Hogwarts. Malfoy had been preoccupied with clearing the family name by jumping through all of the hoops the Ministry asked of him, and then by slowly finding his feet in the world of academia. Harry, meanwhile, had been a restless ball of energy, flitting from one thing to the next and slowly mucking up the life that he imagined everyone had been attempting to plan out for him. He'd had an uninspired, short career as an Auror (Ron's was illustrious, and still going strong), and then had spent one miserable season as a seeker for Puddlemere United before bowing out (he'd clearly just been signed on for his famous name, and the rest of the team had known it—or at least that was what he had imagined). He'd done several other odd jobs, most pro-bono (Harry lived a laughably frugal existence and his inheritance continued to take care of him—he had felt guilty accepting money), none of which he'd kept up for long. He'd been in a bit of a slump and had probably been driving all of his friends batty with his listlessness and complaints of boredom. There they all were, getting on with their lives, and Harry couldn't manage to go one week without sabotaging himself.

He'd been drinking one night (alone—of course), brooding about death-with-a-capital-D, when he'd received a surprise visit from Hermione. After the requisite scolding over his bright decision to get pissed alone, she had poured herself a glass, flopped into her usual armchair, and put her feet up, letting her head loll back with a heavy sigh. They'd sat in silence for several minutes, and then Hermione had looked up at him and said, "Ron and I..." She had sighed again, set her mouth in a bit of a frown. "I'm applying for a research position in North America."

Harry had drunk a _lot_ that night.

Hermione had got the position, of course, and within the year she had been off on an adventure, one that was all hers. Harry had been happy for her—even Ron had been happy for her—but he had also felt horribly empty. In his head, he relived his so-called glory days through nightmares, errant thoughts, and constant feelings of guilt. The guilt rooted him to the gloom of Grimmauld Place, drove him out into the world to 'do something', and then pushed him to retreat again whenever he felt himself achieving even the slightest bit of happiness or success. It didn't help that the entirety of wizarding Britain still seemed to be keeping up with his every move.

After nearly two years of watching Harry feel stuck and sorry for himself, Ron had finally cracked and enrolled his best mate in a cookery course behind his back. One that took place at a community centre not far from Ron's modest flat in a mainly-Muggle area of London. Harry had been furious with him, but after a shouting match, had agreed to attend. The course hadn't been glamorous, he'd learned nothing new, but for the first time in a very long time, he'd felt... normal. In the cookery course, he was just Harry. No one wanted his autograph, no one neglected their work in order to sneak glances at him, and no one (aside from the teacher) seemed to give a fig about whether or not he had a good potato-peeling technique.

He spent months creating and mailing applications to various Muggle universities and colleges, forging a Muggle-friendly transcript based on what he had taken at Hogwarts with Hermione's (grudging) advice over several floo calls. He'd received far more rejections than he had offers, but this had delighted rather than discouraged him. He'd posted his favourite rejections on the sitting room wall, and would show them off whenever he had guests (it had been a... _funny_ time in his life), but he had eventually accepted one of the offers and left Grimmauld Place behind for his own cramped section of a shared dormitory room. 

His roommate had been quiet and uninterested in him—unfazed by the reality of The Boy Who Lived, well... living with him. Another delight to add to Harry's growing pile. His first year he had knocked about in all sorts of classes as a criminology major (Hermione's suggestion), but by the end he'd completely switched tracks to earth sciences, with a particular interest in geology. There was something calming about rocks—how they formed, how they endured, how varied in shape they could be. The little bouts of field work he had been permitted to do in his third and fourth years had been even more calming. It had been an easy decision to pursue a Master's degree. 

For the next decade he had travelled extensively, occasionally crossing paths with old friends like Luna and Neville—making time to visit Ron and Hermione whenever they weren't too busy themselves. Magic stretched his resources, and when they became too thin, he would find odd jobs, get by on his crude language skills. Asking for directions and not provoking double-takes was yet another delight to add to a list that Harry really hadn't needed to worry about for a very long time.

It was yet another decade, after the Statute of Secrecy had fallen, before Malfoy had come back into his life, though they had avoided one another as much as possible until it was clear they no longer could. Malfoy had seemed just as eager as him to cover up their less than amicable past, the both of them divulging their acquaintance to the higher-ups, while glossing over the childhood attempts at murder (as one does). They'd managed civility this way for a good long while, mainly due to their routines in training and on the ship rarely coinciding, but the civility had gone out the window once they had been all but forced to share a bunk-room.

Malfoy's first word had been _scarhead_ , while Harry's had been _fucking ponce_.

Harry considered those two words a package deal when it came to Malfoy.

There had been a certain relief in breaking with their politeness, returning to where they had left off as young adults. It was obvious that they had each changed over the years, that they had matured, formed reputations and shed the frustrations and insecurities that had once led to their mutual antagonism (if by 'mutual', one meant 'Malfoy always started it', that is). Underneath all of that growth, however, lay the Malfoy that Harry had known as a boy: arrogant, dramatic, petty, and frankly—ridiculous. But then, Harry supposed he had always been clever, determined, and reliable as well, he just hadn't given Harry any time to notice between all of the name calling. Once, the taunting had been the bane of Harry's existence—now the names all rolled off his back, harmless, a source of nostalgia, even.

Name calling had turned into the occasional serious conversation just before falling asleep, and then into mealtimes spent in conversation rather than in an awkward silence while waiting for their magic to equalize. They'd gone from stilted remarks and outright avoidance to in-jokes, easy, meaningless insults, and a steady stream of chatter over the radio throughout the work shifts that they shared. It was true that their steady gravitation towards one another might have simply been due to there being no other magic-users on board—but then, Harry really had come to like the wanker and his poor sense of humour. 

There was also the small matter of the time that he and Malfoy had been somewhat drunk and fallen into Malfoy's bunk together, working their inebriation off in the biblical sense.

The next few times it had happened, they'd both been completely sober, so there hadn't been much wiggle room to write the encounters off as errors in judgement. Harry still wasn't entirely certain what to make of their unofficial arrangement, but he got the impression that he wasn't the only one happy to continue it. More than half the time, Malfoy would crawl back from the lab late, peel off his uniform, and slide into the top bunk if he noticed Harry's eyes were open. Sometimes it was nothing more than that—sharing the tiny surface area of the bunk for a short while, breathing deeply and thinking their own separate thoughts. Then Malfoy would brush past him again and climb back down to his own bed, the both of them quickly falling deeply asleep. Other times, Harry would pull Malfoy in for a kiss, more.

And then there were times, in the dark, when they would slip and call one another by their first names.

"Is the headache still there?"

"It's receding," Malfoy replied in an airy tone. "Though you really did gamble with my life by not coming here straightaway when I commed you."

"Do we need to take out a blueprint of the ship?"

"I really don't care where your precious duct was."

"It's right here, Malfoy," Harry said, pointing to the corner of one of his eyes. "Would you like me to get out my violin as well?"

Malfoy almost hadn't been able to quash a laugh, but Harry saw him wrestle it valiantly off of his face, and then turn all of his focus onto the packet that contained his (apparently vile) meal. The man was too picky by half.

"What were you doing, then?"

"When?" He was chewing half-heartedly on the day's slightly-overcooked pasta.

"Earlier. To cause the headache."

"I wasn't casting, if that's what you were trying to imply."

Harry gave him a pointed look, and after a moment, Malfoy finally gave in and huffed out a sigh.

"Fine, fine, I cast one or two."

"Then why not call me sooner?"

"You might have been busy, and the requisitions for the bridge needed finishing. It was a calculated risk." He pointed his spork at Harry for emphasis. "And I really don't think you've got any business berating me for that when you're constantly subjecting everyone here to your particular brand of risk-taking. Walking outside untethered? Do you even stop to think about what would happen to me if you died?" Malfoy asked, waving his spork in frustration before shaking his head at Harry. "You don't have a leg to stand on."

Harry winced. "It's not... that bad."

"It's not? Oh, well—my mistake. I don't actually have a heart attack every time you suit up. Just every _other_ time, and that's loads better."

"Well, last time we really needed the titanium, and rotating the asteroid would have taken forever, eating up energy that we couldn't spare. It was more efficient—and I didn't see you complaining when I handed you those core samples." He could see all of the tubes containing raw materials organized along the far wall, many of them courtesy of Harry's so-called 'recklessness'. He tended to think of his snap decisions as being 'calculated' instead. Everyone was a critic.

"Thank you ever so much, Potter, for going above and beyond in performing exactly the duties outlined in your job description."

"Do you ever just... listen to yourself?"

A cherubic smile alighted on Malfoy's face, similar to the sort that Harry sometimes caught in the dark when they were just lying next to one another quietly—though his smile at the moment had an undercurrent of mockery to it. Harry shook his head, unable to help but smile back in exasperation, and set about tidying up his finished meal packet, stripping apart and divvying up the materials it was made from in order to ease the recycling process. He'd always been a fast eater, but his tendency had felt even more pronounced next to Malfoy, who seemed to take a personal satisfaction in letting his meal turn stone-cold before taking the first bite. It drove Harry up the wall.

"Aren't you going to—"

The proximity alarm.

Harry looked up to see Malfoy placing his spork into his meal packet with a murderous expression, and snorted out a laugh that was completely covered up by the piercing noise reverberating throughout the room. It was a longer walk to their rendez-vous point this time (which they tried to shorten by jogging), so when they eventually reached the mess hall, they had had no choice but to stand in the back of the room, watching as their section chief pushed his way through the throng to reach the front wall. He spoke into his cupped hand again as he went, and then it was only a minute or two before the alarm cut out.

Two holograms rapidly coalesced in front of the projection screen, to form one tableau. The commander was looking out at them again, but so was their captain. Harry straightened from his slouch against the back wall, even though the captain couldn't see him.

"Hello everyone," Captain Konoe addressed them from her seat on the bridge; Commander Pekkanen stood next to her, hands clasped behind her back. "By now, I'm certain that you've heard through the grapevine that we have confirmed the anomaly tearing through the Solar System is a black hole. I haven't yet met a person on board who is capable of keeping their cards close to their chest for more than a minute, so I won't be penalizing anyone for spreading this classified information prematurely."

She allowed her amusement to reach her eyes, and Harry felt personally attacked by her analogy, he really did.

Her expression cleared, and she looked serious once again. "Dr. Srivastava and his team have been crunching the numbers around the clock since that confirmation and unfortunately have come to the conclusion that the black hole's projected course now falls within our current trajectory. The probability of it coming within catastrophic range of this vessel in the next 144 hours is now 13.6%." She let that sink in. "In light of this, all non-essential projects, experiments, and functions are now suspended until further notice. Dr. Srivastava is working with all section heads to draw up your new assignments and distribute them as soon as possible. If you don't get one, that means we need you to keep doing whatever it is you're already doing." She settled back into her chair. "Now, it's not all terrible news. As far as we have been able to tell, the black hole has steered clear of Earth. It is currently blocking Earth from our sensors, but has remained at a large enough distance, moving parallel to it, that we believe Earth may suffer only some short term ill-effects. Nothing that the teams back home can't handle. Further, the black hole is now moving away from Earth and towards us, which hopefully means that it will exit the Solar System entirely."

Beside him, Malfoy was staring at the floor, his mouth set in a thin line, one of his legs and several of his fingers vibrating with impatience. Harry caught himself before he placed a comforting hand on Malfoy's shoulder, wondering at the invisible boundaries that still towered between them during their work hours, at the way he, at least, pretended distance.

One of the most painful things that had come out of Harry's inability to move forward during those first years after the war had been the dissolution of his relationship with Ginny. She had been ready to dash into adulthood, focusing on her studies, training tirelessly with the Gryffindor Quidditch team in order to attract the notice of scouts. Harry, meanwhile, had felt miserable, exhausted, tired of living for others, and their expectations. Ginny had tried hard to make things work, to motivate Harry to care about his future, to leave the house, to apply himself to something—anything—instead of constantly retreating. But she had eventually left him. Harry could still remember her in tears, the sympathy, pity, anguish, and relief all mixing into one terrible emotion on her face as she said, "I can't stay with you."

They had avoided one another for years, the pain of all the dreams and expectations that they had agreed to quash too difficult to face. There hadn't been any question of Harry forgiving Ginny for leaving when she had, when he had been at such a low point, but that hadn't meant it had always been easy to push resentment away in favour of understanding. It had helped, sometimes, to hear how happy she seemed to be (Ron, bless him, was always very reluctant to mention Ginny to him in conversation unless expressly asked), to know how well her career as a professional Quidditch player had taken off. By the time Harry had heard she had begun dating someone seriously, he'd been well into his third year at the university, and somehow, the knowledge hadn't cut as badly as he had expected it to.

They'd only started talking properly again when Harry had begun his stint of globetrotting, ending up in the same city that her team had been slated to play a match in. Harry had decided to go to the match without telling her, sitting near one of the exits so that he could make a quick getaway if things got too difficult—but they hadn't. Time and distance had repaired something in him, and he'd enjoyed watching her in her element, cheering on each catch, throw, and pass, without feeling as though he had missed his chance. Maybe, he had thought instead, for the first time, he had never had one to begin with.

Harry had gone to talk to her afterwards, to congratulate her for a well-played match (they had lost), and had even managed a civil conversation with Zabini, who, Harry had to admit, wasn't such a bad bloke. They had seemed happy and in-synch, something that he and Ginny had never managed; she had always wanted glamour, action, and recognition, while Harry had just wanted to be normal, to go unnoticed. Seeing the two of them together, he had finally understood and accepted that no matter what he had or had not done, he would not have been able to make Ginny happy the way that Zabini did. It had been just the closure he had needed to push forward in his life again. To focus again on what he wanted for himself, on what would make him happy rather than on which choices wouldn't make _someone else_ unhappy.

Which he supposed was still the part he was struggling with. Despite all of the time he had spent pursuing his own interests, disconnecting from a world that still seemed unduly interested in him and his choices, he still fell into a habit of self-effacement. He still caught himself thinking, _what would they think_? Not about Harry being bisexual (he was pretty certain his closest friends had figured that out before he had, himself), but about him considering Malfoy in a way that had started at friendship, and then driven far off-road. It shouldn't have mattered, but the ideas about what people would think or say stuck in his head, stopping his reactions cold—what sort of article would _The Prophet_ print about him? What sort of gossip would their crewmates circulate? More to the point, how would Malfoy— _Draco_ react if Harry admitted that he wanted more? What if he ruined what they already had by calling attention to it?

Decades on, and he still sometimes felt as though his life were not his own, as though he were still being spied upon and scrutinized to the degree he had been as a young adult.

Harry felt Draco elbow him in his side and snapped his attention back to the end of the Captain's update.

"...thank you, Commander Pekkanen. We have a lot of work to do, if the _Dawn_ is to navigate far enough out of the collision range in time, and with any luck, we won't need to set off the proximity alarm again." She spared a small chuckle for them. "Maybe we could discourage the black hole's approach by broadcasting the alarm at it."

The commander looked like she was trying very hard not to groan.

"What?" Captain Konoe asked, glancing over at her with an air of mischief. "I can't even make a joke?"

Commander Pekkanen shook her head with a resigned smile.

" _Mattaku_..." the captain sighed under her breath. "I'll keep plan B, for _boombox_ , tucked away, then." The commander's smile turned pained, had an undercurrent of fondness. "Let's hope that plan A works. You're the best of the best, and I trust you all with my life, as I hope you all trust me with yours. This time next week, let's all share a toast with that alcohol I know absolutely nothing about. Dismissed."

\--------

The next ninety-odd hours had been some of the most stressful aboard the ship, with everyone willingly cutting down on sleep in order to get things done in time. Dr. Srivastava and his team had provided constant updates on the black hole's trajectory, while also constantly recalculating counter-trajectories that had the highest probability of keeping them ahead of the danger or letting them avoid it entirely. De Bruijn's team had been urged to prioritize finding an asteroid containing compounds that could be used to make fuel suitable for long-range travel (Draco had been gloating about that indirect victory ever since he'd heard). Every crew member with a fair ability in maths had been absorbed into Dr. Srivastava's team, with everyone else taking over the sort of maintenance work that Harry was normally tasked with, and supporting those tackling the looming threat directly.

Harry, for his part, became a permanent fixture in Draco's lab while they waited for De Bruijn to find them an asteroid that Harry could mine. In the meantime, Harry cleaned instruments, fetched tools, and acted as a giant battery, fuelling all of the spells that Draco cast in his trans-synthetic reactions. He periodically reminded Draco to eat and rest as well, but he didn't figure that he could claim those as part of his assignment description, if asked.

Draco let go of his stirring rod suddenly, in the middle of filtering out precipitate from the base of a burn ointment that he would then transfigure into synthetic sheets that mimicked skin. He shut off the flame that had been heating the solution, stepped away from the worktable, and motioned for Harry to drop what he was doing as well (packing newly-recycled CO2 filters into a container for the reclamation team).

"Which bay?" He was already picking up his carrying case, opening it on the only stretch of free counter in the lab, and heading for the empty sample tubes stacked in a corner. "Yes, he's with me—we're heading down immediately, Commander."

Draco turned to him. "They're reeling it in as we speak."

"Finally!" Harry exclaimed, the thought of going out to poke holes in a space rock making his heart race in anticipation. He went to grab some sample tubes as well. "Which bay is it?"

"Delta—they're bringing the suits down now, along with your drills."

"What am I looking for?"

"Aluminium," Malfoy told him simply, shutting the carrying case and hefting it down off of the counter. "The more you can extract, the better. They're certain that the asteroid contains a fair amount, they just aren't certain how much, or where exactly it is. The asteroid is a large one, but not as big as the ship—with help, it shouldn't take too long to locate the deposits. As long as you get that aluminium, I can make and refine a rudimentary fuel."

"Consider it done," Harry said easily, tapping the button to open the lab door for them both. They hurried down to the lower level, with Harry leading the way through the maze-like guts of the ship, sidestepping and jogging past other crew members in their haste to reach Delta bay. When they arrived, a team was already unclipping and preparing all the sections of Harry's spacewalking suit so that they could get him fastened into it as quickly as possible. He had already been secured into the boot and leg portions of the suit when he glanced over and noticed that a few people had branched off and were helping Draco step into the legs of his own spare one.

"What d'you think you're doing?"

"Going with you."

Harry blinked and then shook his head. "No you're not."

"I am, actually, and it's not up for debate," Draco retorted in a no-nonsense tone. "This isn't the time to be thinking about glory, Potter. We need that aluminium as quickly as possible, and I'm the only other person who can keep up with you on spacewalks—keep you from being an idiot."

Harry absently held his arms straight up as they lowered the chest piece, staring over at Draco. "Did the commander clear it?"

"That really doesn't matter," Draco said dismissively, stepping into the magnetized boots.

"Yes it does," Harry exclaimed in exasperation. "What if there's an accident and something happens to you—how is the fuel going to get made, then?"

"I really don't care, because that won't happen," Draco told him, sounding deceptively unconcerned. "You'll just have to make certain that it doesn't."

"Malfoy—"

"I'm going with you, and you have no authority to stop me," he snapped, raising his arms above his head for his own chest piece. "So stop wasting your breath."

Harry lifted the palms of his hands in surrender as the arms of his suit were fitted into place. The gloves followed, and then, finally, the helmet was being placed over his head and secured with sturdy locking mechanisms. The air system immediately whirred to life, and he felt the interior thermal modulator start to compensate for the chill that the compressed air created inside the suit. It was then a simple matter of stepping into the harness that the team held out for him and telling them which tools should be secured into the belt that would go over the harness. Since Draco had stubbornly insisted on joining him, he could take care of the sample tubes (Harry could already hear the dramatic complaints), ferrying them back and forth to the ship as Harry gradually filled them with drilled cores. It meant more space for Harry to carry a wider variety of drill bits.

Once each of their harnesses and belts had been secured, they were brought out into the decompression chamber near Delta bay's airlock, where they were each tethered to the ship by a thick, braided metal cable that was woven and clipped into their harnesses. Then, after a final check by the other crew members to ensure that everything on their suits was closed, sealed, and secured the way it should be, they were left alone in the decompression chamber, and the atmosphere was vented back into the ship.

The airlock opened.

It was one thing to look out at space from the portholes, or the larger windows that some sections of the ship had been fitted with (like the mess hall or the bridge), but another thing entirely to stand at the very edge of it, to look out into it without a barrier between you and its dark infinity.

The part right before Harry stepped off of the ledge and out into the void always brought him back to the Forbidden Forest, to the singular moment in his life when he had understood that the time had come for him to die. When he had let go of his fear of that, and simply put one foot in front of the other.

He did that now—felt the euphoria, the humility that came from experiencing oneself as something infinitesimally small, one single thread in the tapestry of an entity far greater than one could ever fathom. With this, problems, worries, every part of oneself which lived in restraint grew infinitesimal as well.

Harry grinned, his feet lifting from the ground with each step, as light and as untethered to reality as he felt.

The radio inside his suit crackled.

"Are you going to dance around, or are you going to help me find the deposits?"

"I'm going to dance."

"Potter."

"Just keeping the mood light." He didn't physically hear Draco's groan of annoyance, but he didn't have to: his imagination supplied it in perfect detail. "I'm going to take a few small samples and see where the action is."

" _Where the action is_? You've been spending too much time with Rochelle."

"Pot—kettle."

"Yet I don't seem to be adopting her crass expressions."

"I'm going to tell her you said that."

"I'll tell her myself."

"Are you certain you're currently operating at full snob levels today?"

"Piss off." Draco's disbelieving laughter carried over the radio—filled Harry's suit.

The asteroid was pockmarked, in some places making Harry think of petrified coral, in others reminding him of rock formations he had seen on a solitary trek through the Canary Islands half a lifetime ago. The stone was a bit too smooth for comfort, overall, and even with boots that could magnetize, Harry found himself slipping every few steps. "You alright, Malfoy?"

"Merlin and Morgana," he grumbled, "did the gods wax this sodding rock before they sent it to us?"

"I'd say that would be a fair assumption."

"Let's just get on with it."

"That's the spirit."

Despite Harry's reputation for doing things on spacewalks that later earned him reprimands, he never took risks unless he could see no other way to resolve a situation. He also wasn't the idiot that Draco frequently accused him of being; he was much better at looking before he leapt now than he had been as a teenager. He still had his moments, however.

"I'm liking the look of this area."

Harry took out his drill and fitted it with the thinnest bit he had—it was also one of the longest. The bit had been one of Draco's recent creations, made of an alloy he had trans-synthesized and bolstered with magic to be both incredibly durable and able to detect the materials that Harry had to mine most frequently. Each predetermined material had a corresponding colour that Harry had memorized—the presence of aluminium would cause the drill bit to glow yellow when Harry pulled it back out.

Harry powered the bit through the rock in several places spaced just a couple of steps apart with no luck before it finally lit up. With an awkward leap of triumph, he switched the sampling bit out for a coring bit which could extract a chunk of the aluminium ore—if they were _truly_ lucky, the metal would be in its elemental state, but Harry wouldn't hold his breath for that. He shifted his feet several times to make sure that his footing was solid, and then began drilling. Without a word, Draco unlatched the cover of one of the sample tubes around his waist and angled it outward, waiting for Harry to drop the extracted core into it.

They made painstakingly slow progress for the next three hours, inching their way all over the asteroid's surface for all the disparate pockets of ore. Draco had already returned to the decompression chamber once to exchange the filled sample tubes for empty ones with the team that was on standby for them in Delta bay. Everything that Harry had extracted so far had been ore (silicate, if he wasn't mistaken), with a few of the cores having very small veins of pure aluminium. A promising sign, but thus far Harry hadn't managed to locate a sizeable deposit. Draco could make just as much use of the ore, it would just unfortunately take longer to refine, and they would need far more of it—they estimated having to exchange sample tubes at least once more, twice to be certain they would be able to make enough fuel for any possibility.

Harry was sweating, his legs cramping at having to walk in such a careful, stilted manner to avoid slipping, but stopping and taking a break simply wasn't an option. Draco would still need to create the fuel after they'd gathered enough, and there wasn't anyone who could mine out in space quite as effectively as Harry could, so they had no choice but to keep pushing forward, trying to finish as quickly as possible.

Luckily, the spacewalk suits were all designed to support continuous wear for twelve hours in the event of an emergency—nine hours, if the wearer was engaging in strenuous activity (Harry and Draco certainly were). There was a spout in each of their helmets through which they could drink an enriched, water-based solution to keep from becoming dehydrated as they worked, as well as a system in the pelvic area of the suit to take care of any resulting waste. There was a time when Harry had made many an immature joke about said system, but he had since grown tired of it (a lie he told himself). The last time Harry had been required to stay out past the four hour mark they had been navigating the Oort cloud, and he'd been out mining every shift, everyone wanting to take advantage of the abundance of asteroids before they left the Solar System completely to travel in the relative void between it and the Alpha Centauri System. Intercepting an asteroid after they'd left the Oort cloud had been a rare and unhurried affair, with Harry able to go alone and take his time mining over the course of several shifts. 

After two hours more, Draco had been able to go back and switch out the sample tubes again for empty ones, the both of them keeping one another distracted from exhaustion with idle chatter, the occasional anecdote, and most importantly, a constant stream of questions, updates, and affirmations. Harry found it sometimes helped to narrate what he was doing—Draco seemed to find it helpful to be a smartarse about every other thing.

Following protocol, Harry and Draco had started mining in the centre of the asteroid and had slowly spiralled outwards, towards the slightly more dangerous edges of the enormous chunk of space rock. It was at such an edge that Harry made an exciting find: finally, one of the core samples he extracted contained a solid chunk of aluminum—roughly one third of the core, right at the bottom, appeared to be pure aluminium.

"I _knew_ this one would be it!"

"Remind me: how many times so far have you said you had a 'good feeling' only for the dowsing bit to come up unlit, the core bit to come up filled with ore?"

"I'm not going to dignify that with a response."

"Classic confirmation bias, Potter. May I use you as a source when I eventually write my textbook?"

"Can we focus?" Harry barked out in an indignant laugh.

" _I_ have been."

Harry set about extracting more cores around the first hole he had made using a narrower core bit, and gradually a picture of the area formed for him. All of the samples that contained pure aluminium were found closest to the edge of the asteroid, and in those, the raw metal never reached higher than the one third mark. Unfortunately, he had already used his longest core bit to extract samples, so there was no way, from his current vantage, to extract more than one third at a time. However, if he _changed_ vantage...

"I have an idea."

"I'm going to stop you there, Potter."

"It's really not that dangerous—wouldn't you like samples of pure aluminium?"

"Not if it means you doing something idiotic."

"I'll be tethered the whole time, and you can supervise me as I climb down."

"As you _climb_..." Draco's voice ratcheted up several levels of disbelief. "No."

"You'll do fine at supervising," Harry grinned, able to see Draco's face only faintly through the highly reflective glass of his helmet. "And this way, we can get the rest of what we need and get back to the ship with plenty of time before supper. I am ninety-five percent certain that if I climb down this side of the rock, I'll be able to collect two or three nearly-pure samples of aluminium, drilling horizontally. That would be more than enough, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, but—"

"You realize this is rather tame for me, yeah?" The grin hadn't left Harry's face—he could feel the adrenaline in his system ramping up in anticipation of hanging over the edge of the asteroid, the only thing holding him back from an eternity of falling through the void a comparatively tiny metal cable anchored to the ship. "This is what I'm here to do."

Draco didn't reply for several moments. "Be fucking careful, Potter, or I'll murder you myself as soon as we get back to the ship."

"You really don't ever listen to yourself, do you?"

"Just get on with it," Draco replied, sounding frustrated, and not in his usual mocking way.

Harry didn't need to be told twice. Checking to make sure that the tools on his belt were all secure, he then did several experimental pulls on his harness, and another handful on the metal cord that was his only tether to the ship. Finding everything in order, he approached the edge of the asteroid, and peered over the side. His footing was somewhat unstable, which would make it difficult to get good hand and footholds as he lowered himself, but that was what the tether was for. Going face-first would make for a much easier, safer descent, but it would also make drilling and passing the core samples back up to Draco much more difficult. So feet-first it was.

Harry turned so that he was facing away from the edge and lowered himself into a crouch (difficult, in the bulk of the suit, but he managed), before letting his boots slide out into thin air. His heart beat out the shape of his fear in a steady rhythm, but he focused on the task at hand and his breathing—giving in to the fear would just make things more difficult, would just cause mistakes. He thought of being able to go eat supper, if only he could do the next handful of extractions. Slowly, he slid further, letting his legs gradually dangle out into the empty space, where they were eerily buoyant. When his chest was halfway off of the ledge, he held on as tightly as he could with the ridged palms of his gloves, and put all of his effort into swinging his lower body down until it connected with the side of the asteroid. His right boot slipped the first time he tried to plant it against the rock, but the second time it stayed and he let out a silent breath of relief.

Then he set to work.

Drilling was ten times harder hanging off the side of the asteroid, because he had to do it all one handed, while maintaining his balance, and while being unable to look down at his tool belt properly. It took him a few tries to find the right depth in the side of the asteroid (he let several useless samples float harmlessly off into space), but once he did, it was like Christmas. He extracted three utterly beautiful samples that he carefully held up in the drill bit for Draco to place into tubes. The core samples couldn't have been more than five percent rock—the rest appeared to be pure, elemental aluminium. Harry felt like they'd won the lottery.

With the third pure sample, they had more than Draco had imagined they would need, but Harry hadn't been able to resist trying for a fourth. No matter where he drilled, however, the samples came back mostly as rock with mere veins of pure aluminium or ore.

"Would you stop being stubborn and get back up here so we can return to the ship?" Draco finally asked with impatience. "I'm starving."

"Alright," Harry sighed, feeling some disappointment. "I just figured, since I was already down there, if there was any possibility of finding another—well. It's fine. I'll just secure my drill."

Harry pressed the drill against his belt, moving it around in small circles until it finally clicked into its retaining clasp and he could let go of it. He reached up to wedge his gloved fingers into a smooth recess at eye level, relieved to be able to hold on and climb with both hands again. He reached up with his other hand, aiming for a small crevice that sat just over the top of his helmet.

Harry startled at the sudden, loud hissing sound.

Blinking, his eyes slowly focused on the crack in the glass before him.

He registered the fact that his foot had slipped again, unbalancing him and pitching him forward until his helmet had connected with the side of the asteroid.

" _Harry_!"

Draco's shout overwhelmed the hissing sound, which seemed to be getting louder with each passing second. Harry's vision swam and he felt something wet slide into his eyebrow, then down over his right temple.

"I'm... fine." That was probably not true, but Harry needed to convince himself, at least for the rest of the climb back up.

He felt a tug on his back, and realized belatedly that Draco had probably grabbed his tether, trying to help speed his ascent. Part of his forehead began to throb, the loud hissing of his helmet and a constant stream of nervous chatter from Draco combining to form a droning sort of noise. The relentless work of the past five-some hours caught up with him then, all at once, and he felt too exhausted to lift another finger. Somehow, he made it over the edge of the asteroid anyway, felt Draco hauling him up the rest of the way by his shoulders.

" _Please_ —can you keep yourself upright?"

Harry wasn't sure if Draco could hear his mumbled answer over the deafening noise being caused by the crack in his helmet, but he did his best to put one boot in front of the other, his chest feeling heavy, until he couldn't anymore. He felt a strong tug at his back again, then fell against something moving.

Draco kept speaking, sounded frantic.

He was too tired to make out the words, and let his eyes drift closed.

Just for a moment, of course.

When he managed to open them again, his helmet was off, and the ceiling of Delta bay swam overhead. Then, Draco's face filled his field of vision.

 

"Don't you _dare_ die on me, Harry," he was snarling, his pupils pinpricks of terror, "I told you not to do it, that _idiotic_ stunt—you are _not_ going to leave me alone with Muggles for the rest of my days." He appeared to search Harry's face for something, the look of terror intensifying. "Blink if you can understand me."

"And here I thought..." Harry rasped weakly, "you had got past all that pureblood lunacy."

"Don't waste your breath trying to be a smartarse," Draco snapped, managing somehow to laugh while simultaneously bursting into tears, his whole face crumpling with worry. His hand brushed back some of Harry's fringe (it bounced back immediately, unfazed), and then slipped down to his cheek, where it stayed until, protesting, he was gently pushed out of the way so that an officer with medical training could look Harry over.

Harry smiled as the world drained of colour, and went dark.

\--------

He drew in a long, whistling breath, his chest feeling unusually heavy. He concentrated on that for a while—inhaling and exhaling—and on the confusing dream he had been having (though the details slipped away the harder he thought about them). Then he opened his eyes.

It was dark, except for a weak source of light coming from somewhere behind his head.

He stared belatedly ahead. He wasn't lying fully on his back, but the angle of his head made it difficult to see anything but the wall, the ceiling. He became aware of a throb in his forehead, somewhere above his right temple, realized he was holding something in his right hand.

Oh.

Another hand.

He tried to squeeze it, but his grip was so weak that it was more like a tap.

The hand tightened around his own in reaction, and then he heard a sharp gasp.

"Thank fucking Merlin!" Came a breathy exclamation. "You took your bloody time, didn't you."

Harry tried to turn his head towards the familiar voice, but stopped when the movement started to make him feel dizzy. A hand touched his shoulder, applied just enough pressure to suggest he stay still. 

"Don't be an idiot. You'll send yourself back into a coma..." Draco hesitated. "Potter."

"It's Harry." He almost startled at his own voice, at how small and desiccated it sounded, the words barely escaping the cavern of his mouth. "Just Harry."

"Alright." Draco said in a subdued murmur after a moment of silence.

"Water," Harry rasped next, the request occurring to him suddenly, as if his brain were still attempting to boot up all its most essential systems and his thirst had only just come online.

"Hang on," he heard Draco say, and then the sweat on the palm of his right hand was exposed to the cool air. There was the scrape of chair legs against the floor, a clatter, and then a _fuck_ muttered with far more vitriol than was likely necessary. The crass language was followed by an excessively loud sigh. After a moment, he could hear the rush of water gushing from a tap and hitting what must have been the inside of a cup.

When Draco returned to the bedside, he stood close enough that Harry could finally see his face, the expression there one of clear relief—though everything else about him spoke of exhaustion. His unwashed hair, unshaven face, and sunken eyes made him look haggard and far older than he was. Before Harry could think to ask, Draco was pressing a button on the side of the bed, which caused it to slowly lift Harry into a sitting position. "Here," he said quietly when the bed stopped moving, and held a stainless steel cup out near Harry's chin for him to take.

Harry tried his best to grip the cup and tip it towards his lips, but he missed his mouth by several centimetres and a splotch of water fell and formed on top of the blankets that that pooled in his lap.

"Should have thought of that," Draco sighed to himself before gently taking the cup back from Harry's shaking hands and leaving the side of the bed again. This time, sitting up, Harry could see more of the space, and he took stock of the almost-unrecognizable medical bay. A huge work station had been set up in the middle of the room, with sample containers and tools stacked or strewn on just about every other available surface. Harry appeared to be the only patient currently convalescing, and Dr. Zborovsky wasn't anywhere to be seen.

When Draco returned to his side, there was a straw sticking out of the cup, and he didn't let go of it this time when he held it under Harry's chin, even guided the straw to the corner of Harry's mouth with a dry look. The first few swallows caused some coughing, but after some of the humidity had returned to Harry's throat, he was able to drink more steadily. After what had felt like an awfully long time, Harry let the straw slip from his lips and settled his head back against his pillow with a tired exhale.

"Thanks," he murmured, relieved that his voice sounded closer to normal.

Draco placed a hand absently on Harry's shoulder in acknowledgement before turning away to set the cup down on a surface out of Harry's line of sight. The other man pulled his chair as close to the bedside as possible and sat down heavily.

"How long?" Harry asked, turning his head with painstaking slowness (no dizziness this time) so that he could see Draco's face while he spoke.

"You've been out almost a week."

" _But the_ —"

"Settle down," Draco said with disapproval, cutting off Harry's sudden exclamation. "There is absolutely nothing to get out of sorts about. I received permission from Captain Konoe to move part of my lab into the medical bay as soon as it became apparent that your concussion was more serious than initially thought. By that, I mean to say that you didn't even allow Dr. Zborovsky the courtesy of completing his preliminary examination before you slipped into a coma."

"Sorry."

"Hard to believe it when you've got a smile on your face."

"Go on."

But Draco didn't. Instead his mouth twisted with displeasure.

Harry raised an eyebrow and winced at a jolt of pain, regretting his impulse immediately.

"I couldn't think of any other way to refine the aluminium and make the fuel," Draco finally said, with a strange air of defensiveness—no, that wasn't it. Guilt. "But it was either that or remain sitting ducks in the path of that black hole and so—the needs of the many, and all that... There wasn't time to wait for you to recover properly."

Harry stared at him quizzically.

"I've been making the fuel in here, because it was the safest way we could think of for me to continue to access your magic." He looked away, both hands gripping the guardrail on Harry's bed. "Dr. Zborovsky ran some diagnostics—you weren't giving off nearly as much magic as usual, but it was either take the little you were giving off and get on with my work, or allow the whole ship to possibly be swallowed by a black hole. Captain Konoe and Commander Pekkanen approved the risk." Draco's mouth twisted again and Harry wasn't certain, from where he sat, whether the emotion on Draco's face was disgust or anger. "I could have drained you completely without even realizing it."

"And our trajectory now?" Harry asked when it became apparent that Draco wasn't about to say anything more.

He scowled, still looking off to the other side of the room. "As far as Dr. Srivastava's team has been able to tell, our new course has a point zero, zero, zero, whatever-the-fuck chance of entering the radius of the black hole's gravity."

"So... we're in the clear," Harry said slowly, making an educated guess (that university degree had been one of the best investments he had ever made).

"Yes... But—" 

"Then, no harm done."

"But—"

"Draco." Harry felt a shiver, a thrill at saying his first name so casually, just inserting it into conversation, all matter-of-fact. "Stop feeling guilty about something that didn't even happen." Draco shot him a disbelieving look. "If I had been awake, I would have gladly accepted to have you powering all of your spells with my magic, even knowing there was a risk of my magic draining completely. You said yourself that it was the only way—and anyway, I'm fine. You haven't damaged me, or taken anything I didn't want to give." Draco had pressed his trembling lips together, still resolute in looking away.

"Cracking my helmet against that asteroid wasn't my intention or my fault, and it certainly wasn't yours," Harry tried again, lifting one of his weary arms up to place a clumsy hand over one of Draco's. "It was an accident, and you made the best of that bad situation." Harry could see tears rolling down Draco's cheeks, his lips pressed together so hard that they had drained of colour. "And now here we are, the both of us, alive. And that _is_ thanks to you."

Draco covered his eyes with his free hand and finally let a sob escape, nostrils flaring with grief as he began to cry in earnest.

Harry managed to get a weak grip on Draco's wrist and tried pulling it towards him. It took only a few attempts to get his message across, and then Draco was leaning over the guardrail to wrap his arms gently around Harry's shoulders, crying into the crook of his neck instead. Harry felt too tired to return the hug properly, so he settled for patting one of Draco's hips—the only part of him that he could easily reach. When Draco's face was sufficiently hidden, Harry heard him gulp back a sob and say, "I was so afraid—"

Harry tried to keep a grip on Draco's undershirt, the part that had bunched just above his hip, finally tearing up a little, himself.

"I thought," Draco continued in a thick, miserable voice, "this arsehole is going to die without ever hearing me say—"

"I love you."

"Don't put words in my mouth!" Draco sobbed, somehow laughing at the same time.

"I wasn't," Harry replied serenely. "It's just—that's what I would have said."

" _I_ was going to tell you that I love you," Draco huffed, sounding at once scandalized and exasperated, sniffing as well. "Did you _really_ have to steal the moment?"

"It cheered you up, didn't it?"

"You're the one who almost died," Draco exclaimed, barking an incredulous laugh out into Harry's neck.

"I was sleeping through the whole ordeal, though," Harry said, feeling somewhat apologetic. "Things were pretty relaxing from my end, I have to say."

"Oh, they were, were they?" Draco asked in a testy tone, but when he pulled back slightly to look at Harry, his expression was filled with mirth, and something warm. "Relaxation... I wonder what that's like."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! All comments are extremely welcome either here or on [Livejournal](https://hd-fan-fair.livejournal.com/130754.html).
> 
> Edited Dec 11th 2017 to fix formatting disaster in the 2nd scene and minor spelling mistakes.


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